On the heels of the finale of the third season of "Downton Abbey" comes another drama set in England during the early part of the 20th century. But despite its pedigree and gorgeous production values, HBO's thornier "Parade's End" may be a more difficult sell to American audiences than the genial PBS show.

The five-part miniseries is an adaptation by playwright Tom Stoppard of a quartet of novels of the same name by Ford Madox Ford set in England around the time of World War I. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, Adelaide Clemens and Oscar nominee Janet McTeer. Like "Downton" the characters - all products of the end of the Victorian era - are facing a rapidly changing world, but unlike them, those in "Parade's End," directed by Susanna White, seem more trapped and stubborn.

Cumberbatch, known for the role of Sherlock Holmes in PBS' "Sherlock," plays Christopher Tietjens, "the last Tory," a British government official from a wealthy family who eventually joins the army during the war.

His wife, Sylvia (Rebecca Hall), has been cheating on him, and their child may not be his. Meanwhile, the bureaucrat is having an affair with Valentine Wannop (Clemens), a young suffragette, yet has never consummated his relationship.

"I stand for monogamy and chastity," a stern Tietjens declares, though neither of those are happening in his life.

The four-time Tony Award-winning Stoppard, author of plays such as "Travesties" and screenplays like his Oscar-winning "Shakespeare in Love," was keen on casting Cumberbatch in the role of Tietjens even before "Sherlock" made him a star, going so far as to visit him on the set of Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" in which the actor played a World War I British cavalry officer.

"I went to visit 'War Horse' as a groupie, as it were," says Stoppard, "and there was Benedict Cumberbatch, as far as I was concerned, dressed as Christopher Tietjens, using the right voice, the right accent, and coming from the right social background, and it was heartbreaking."

The 36-year-old Cumberbatch, whose parents are actors, has had a steady presence over the last decade on TV, stage and film. He, along with his friend Jonny Lee Miller, who coincidentally plays Sherlock Holmes on CBS' "Elementary," alternated the title role in Danny Boyle's London production of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Both of them ended up sharing the prestigious Olivier Award for best actor.

The actor has also made his mark in films like "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and the "Hobbit" trilogy, where he provided the voice and motion-capture for both Smaug the Dragon and the Necromancer. Besides the highly anticipated "Star Trek Into Darkness," in which he plays the villain, Cumberbatch has a number of intriguing films coming out, including "August: Osage County," based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play and starring Meryl Streep, and "Twelve Years a Slave" from director Steve McQueen, with Brad Pitt. He is currently shooting "The Fifth Estate" in which he plays WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

As for his roles of Holmes and Tietjens, Cumberbatch sees them as "very different animals.

"Christopher is a man with a huge heart and empathy for those near to him," says the actor. "He's a very generous, big-hearted sentimental man whom Ford describes in the books as being one to cry to a piece of music or art. He's very sensitive in comparison to Sherlock."

What the characters have in common, though, is that they don't suffer fools gladly.

"He carves his way through mediocrity," says Cumberbatch about Christopher.

But we forgive Sherlock for his brittleness and unconventionality. He, after all, catches the bad guy in the end and his heart is in the right place. Christopher, on the other hand, is the type of guy who enjoys finding errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica and is lost without his traditional conventions, pushing back against what he sees as a creeping permissiveness.

"He plays somebody who is virtuous to the point of where you sort of want to strangle him in frustration," says Stoppard, who is returning to television for the first time in 30 years.

Cumberbatch, though, defends the character, noting that "He's witty and acerbic. He may not always be an angel, but he's definitely on the side of angels. He fights a very good fight. In my opinion, he's a heroic character."

Then there is Christopher's wife's Sylvia, who could easily be seen as a villainess. Look closer, though, and you see a woman who chafes at being tied down by the conventions of the day.

Hall, the daughter of the acclaimed theater director Peter Hall, calls Sylvia in many ways a modern woman.

"She's very emotionally intelligent, very able, but she has no education and no career, and all of that resource sort of goes untapped. So it goes into manipulation and generally turning into a demon," says the actress. "I mean, if she had something else to do, she probably wouldn't be quite as sadistic as she ends up."

The 30-year-old actress describes "Parade's End" as a story about a society in flux. "There's a sense of times radically changing, and we look at British society often through a lens of nostalgia," she says, "and I think this is something that makes you look at it through a lens of absurdism and surrealism and see it as a society really in hysteria, and literally and metaphorically being about to be blown apart."

That last reference is, of course, to World War I, which Cumberbatch, who has now been in two filmed versions about the conflict, calls "the most extraordinary, hapless, disgraceful waste of two generations' worth of men," adding that on "Parade's End" "It was a very, very potent thing to simulate."

Stoppard, who reportedly spent a year on the script, notes that audiences are usually given a "tidy, neat package," but the story in "Parade's End" does not provide a "cut-and-dried good-and-evil picture."

Ford, he says, saw the moral ambiguity in everything and didn't divide the characters up into those you have sympathy for and those you don't.

"On the contrary," he adds, "it's this silk-screen quality where you keep catching different aspects. "